Daniel Miessler: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. that? Yeah, it's a great question. I make sense of it because I think the value of AI is actually Actually, in the scaffolding more so than the models. So, So what the model is capable is capable of. of doing doesn't really matter if it's not inside of a scaffold that allows it to take inputs and produce outputs that are actually useful. This is why Cloud Code has gone crazy because it is the best scaffolding system, right? The difference between Opus 4.5 and the best Gemini model or the best OpenAI model is not much. And the other two are better in some ways. In fact, the open source models are very close. It's not Anthropic that's blowing up. It's not Opus 4.5 that's blowing up. It's Cloud Code because it's scaffolding. And to answer your question about why this hasn't happened before, even before AI, but in the previous three years of AI, it's because the, in my mind, it's because the average knowledge worker job is extremely general. So when they come into work, you've got to check all these emails. Oh, but you have to watch this video because it's mandatory secure code training. Oh, but also there's this fight going on with your boss and this other person, and you've got to talk about that. Oh, it turns out you have to have an HR meeting. Oh, actually, corporate goals just changed completely. Now we have to redo all of our work. So we're not working on that project anymore. We're spinning over to this other project. So in the course of a week or a month or a year, human workers are being asked to do like these vastly different things. Even in the course of an hour, you might have to check emails, you might have to fix your email, you might have to watch a training course. There's not a scaffolding system that exists right now that would allow an AI to do all of that. It just wouldn't be possible. So you would have AI that's really good at the coding part. Maybe it's really good at writing reports. But how is it taking all those inputs in and producing the output in the same way that a human worker can? It can't, right? And that's why we don't have like giant armies of AI employees out on the market yet. And here's what I'm very worried about. And this is why I think 2027 is the year for AGI in my definition, which is the ability to replace an average human knowledge worker, right? The question is: when will it be, when will the scaffold? And we just saw co-work come out. Is that what they called it? Anthropic co-work? Yeah. We just saw that come out. That is a scaffold system for doing broad tasks at work, right? It's actually for more general tasks as well. But that is the type of thing that somebody can build an AI product on that actually replaces human workers. Because now all those weird, general things that are happening inside the company, those are just one-off tasks. And here's a really crucial point here: it doesn't matter for the replacement of human work and the disruption of the labor economy. hat are happening inside the company, those are just one-off tasks. And here's a really crucial point here: it doesn't matter for the replacement of human work and the disruption of the labor economy. It doesn't matter if it happens with the wizard behind the curtain, which is actually doing a whole bunch of narrow AI, but it's able to do it for all the tasks that an average worker does. And it's just being handled seamlessly with the scaffolding. It doesn't matter if it actually does it way better than an average employee. So when I talk about AGI, I'm not talking about what Archive thinks, the technical research papers. I think it's cool that they're going down that path. And I can't wait to see what they do if they create a truly AGI ASI intelligence. But what I care about is the humans. I care about who's getting fired, who's getting not hired. And I think the way that happens is through a scaffold that can actually do their work better than them, which I think is going to look a whole lot like Pi, which is the project I'm doing, Claude Code, which is what Pi is built on, and Cowork, which they just built with Claude Code. They said they've built it in a week, and there were no humans involved. Cloud Code wrote all the code. Yeah, Anthropic is, in many ways, an organization to watch in terms of a leading indicator on what the future is going to look like. I understand they're not really hiring any junior roles anymore, pretty much at all. And the execution time on some of these things is getting extremely impressive. We've seen some of that from OpenAI as well from time to time. Forget it. I think Codex, they said that they did in six weeks, and that's like two generations ago of models powering it. But those are pretty ambitious things to spin up in a remarkably short period of time. So I guess the key thing there, and I share this intuition, is that I frame it a little bit differently, but I think we have a pretty similar intuition. intuition there where if you can get over this threshold of the drop-in knowledge worker and the interface from the boss to the work getting done can basically be swapped out from you talk to a human to you talk to an AI system that might be three AIs in a trench coat or 57 AIs in trench coat or whatever. But as long as it can handle with sufficient generality whatever you might want to throw at it in a similar way to whatever you might want to throw at a person and not get boneheaded falling over responses back, then it seems like you get to a point where people have very just obvious, and they're not going to miss this, right? Obviously the economic incentives are very strong to not miss this opportunity as it really starts to work. Then people are just going to have like behind door A, you can hire a human or behind door B, you can hire an AI. And the AIs obviously have so many advantages in terms of breadth of knowledge, 24-7 availability, immediate response, like cost. Obviously, there's just that, just to name a few important ones. And so it does seem like we both share a threshold model where when that flips, it could flip really fast. And then we could be in a world in a pretty sudden way where there really just aren't junior jobs in the way that there used to be. And potentially like a lot of people who I think it should be said too, like even our fairly highly educated people, like fairly high status in society, may just find them. And AI can do what they do. And obviously then we have a crisis on our hands. So give me a little bit more detail on like how there's, I guess, a couple of dimensions of this. One is you building. This gets to the Pi project, and we can unpack that in almost a fractal way because there's a lot of depth to it. And then the other question is, how does that translate to a world where some significant share of people can actually maintain some sort of market power, some sort of bargaining position, some sort of ability to be economically viable in the face of the transformations that might come to corporations?…

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